College Mental Health: What’s Changed and What Hasn’t, with Dr. Alexis Redding
Have you ever caught yourself telling your college-aged kid that these will be "the best four years of your life?” This recent episode of College is Fine, Everything is Fine is going to make you rethink that.
We sat down with Dr. Alexis Redding - developmental psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, co-director of the Transition to Adulthood Lab, and author of the new book Mental Health in College - to talk about what's actually changed for young adults over the last 80 years, and what hasn't.
Here's some points that stuck with us.
The "Kids These Days" Narrative Is Older Than You Think
Every generation believes the following generation is more anxious and less resilient. But is that actually true?
Dr. Redding pointed out that this isn't a modern phenomenon. Even Aristotle was saying this too. Her research team's access to recorded student interviews dating back to the 1940s gives them rare insight on this question. Her team found that the core experience of figuring out who you are during the college years is remarkably consistent across generations.
What's different isn't the struggle, it's the amplification. Social media has turned a private, local kind of social comparison (measuring yourself against your roommates and hometown friends) into a global one. It's not a comparison of reality, but almost always a comparison against other people's highlight reels.
Your Brain Is A Terrible Historian
Dr. Redding explains that memory isn't built to give us an accurate record - it's built to keep us safe. Thanks to something called the peak-end rule, we tend to remember the most emotionally intense moment of an experience and how it resolved, while the messy, uncertain middle quietly disappears.
That's why alumni interviewed decades later remembered the dining hall as the place where they built their closest friendships - and had completely forgotten the anxious, lonely first weeks of not knowing where to sit. When those same people played the original recordings of their 20-year-old selves, they were stunned by how uncertain, scared, and lost they had actually sounded.
The takeaway for parents and mentors: telling a struggling young person "don't worry, these will be the best years of your life, you'll make friends who stand up in your wedding" doesn't actually help. What helps is admitting you also once stood in a room not knowing where to sit.
You Don't Need One Mentor, You Need Several
Dr. Redding's work has reframed how we think about mentorship. Instead of one wise, all-knowing guide (or a chaotic crowd of opinions), young adults benefit from a few different tiers of mentors — starting with what she calls mirror mentors: peers, roommates, or people close in age who simply reflect back what they see.
One story that stuck out was a student who was set on becoming a novelist, despite disliking criticism and wanting more financial stability. Her roommate — not a professor, not a career counselor — pointed out that she lit up not when she was writing her own work, but when she was helping her roommate polish an assignment. That five-minute conversation helped redirect her toward founding a writing center. No formal mentorship program required.
"Live It Forward, Connect The Dots Backward"
This phrase from the episode is worth writing down. Looking back, our life choices tend to line up into a tidy, sensible story. Whether it’s the job we didn't get or the major we switched, the pivot we made always "makes sense" in retrospect. But living it never feels that clean. It feels uncertain, risky, and often scary at the moment.
Dr. Redding encourages parents and mentors to resist telling only the polished version of their own story. Sharing the uncertainty, like the real fear that came with the career pivot, not just its successful outcome does far more to normalize a young adult's own uncertainty than a highlight reel ever could.
Questions To Actually Ask Your Parents (Or Your Kids)
If you're a student wanting a more honest conversation with a parent about their path, Dr. Redding suggests going beyond "what do you do for work" and asking things like:
What did you think you'd be doing when you graduated?
What's something you got right, and something you got wrong?
What pivot points changed your direction?
Where does work fit into the rest of your life - not just professionally, but in terms of family and how you wanted to show up in the world?
The Best Thing A Parent Can Do? Talk Less
The instinct to fix, advise, and smooth things over is powerful. However, according to Dr. Redding, it’s usually the wrong move. Most young adults don't need an answer handed to them; they need space to think out loud with someone who cares about them.
Dr. Redding’s advice for parents is: be able to ask questions and sit with the discomfort of not immediately solving the problem.
If we don't create that space, where else are they going to go to process it? A chatbot isn't a substitute for a caring adult who actually knows them.
Dr. Alexis Redding's new book, Mental Health in College, is available now.
Link to purchase the book on Amazon
More Information on Dr. Alexis Redding
To hear the full conversation with Dr. Alexis Redding check out the latest episode of the College Is Fine Podcast below 🎧
